How Capitol violence stands apart from rest in US history

The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by White politicians in the service of rich White Americans.

The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 is easily misunderstood. Shaken by the ordeal, members of Congress have issued statements explaining that America is a nation of laws, not mobs. The implication is that the disruption incited by President Donald Trump is something new. It is not. The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by White politicians in the service of rich White Americans. What was unusual this time is that the White mob turned on the White politicians, rather than the people of colour who are usually the victims.

Of course, the circumstance of this rioting is crucial. The aim was to intimidate Congress into stopping the peaceful transition of power. This is sedition, and in stoking it, Trump has committed a capital offence.

In the past, such mob violence has been aimed at more traditional targets of White hate: African-Americans trying to vote or desegregate buses, housing, lunch counters, and schools; Native Americans trying to protect their hunting lands and natural resources; Mexican farmworkers demanding occupational safety; the Chinese immigrant labourers who previously built the railways and worked the mines. These groups were the targets of mob violence stoked by Americans from President Andrew Jackson and the frontiersman Kit Carson in the nineteenth century to Alabama Governor George Wallace in the twentieth.

Viewed in this historical light, the mob of righteously indignant “good old boys” who stormed the Capitol had a familiar appearance. As Trump put it in his speech fomenting the riot, they were out to “save” America. “Let the weak [politicians] get out. This is a time for strength,” he declared, deploying familiar riffs. “They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.”

Throughout American history, most mob violence has come not as a spasmodic explosion of protest from below, but rather as structural violence from above, instigated by White politicians preying on the fears, hatreds, and ignorance of the White underclass. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson documents in her brilliant new book, How the South Won the Civil War, this variety of mob violence has been a critical part of upper-class white America’s defense of a hierarchical society for more than 150 years.

America’s culture of White mob violence goes hand in hand with its gun culture. The hundreds of millions of privately owned firearms in the US disproportionately belong to Whites; and as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out powerfully in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, “gun rights” have long been invoked by vigilante White mobs to suppress blacks and Native Americans.

Stoking mob violence against people of colour is typically how rich Whites channel poor Whites’ grievances away from themselves. Far from being a specifically Trumpian tactic, it is the oldest trick in the American political playbook. Want to pass a regressive tax cut for the rich? Just tell economically struggling Whites that Blacks, Muslims, and immigrants are coming to impose socialism.

Trump has done precisely this throughout his presidency, warning that without him in office, Americans will “have to learn to speak Chinese”. At his rallies, he routinely champions the Second Amendment and rails against non-Whites, telling congresswomen of colour to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”. He has urged his followers to manhandle opposition demonstrators, and to throw them out – not just from his rallies, but from the country itself. He has praised white supremacists as “very fine people.” After his Confederate-flag-waving mob stormed the Capitol, he said, “We love you, you’re very special.”